The Crimson Letter: Harvard, Homosexuality, and the Shaping of American Culture

By Douglass Shand-Tucci

Book Overview

In a book deeply impressive in its reach while also deeply embedded in its storied setting, bestselling historian Douglass Shand-Tucci explores the nature and expression of sexual identity at America's oldest university during the years of its greatest influence. The Crimson Letter follows the gay experience at Harvard in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, focusing upon students, faculty, alumni, and hangers-on who struggled to find their place within the confines of Harvard Yard and in the society outside.Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde were the two dominant archetypes for gay undergraduates of the later nineteenth century. One was the robust praise-singer of American democracy, embraced at the start of his career by Ralph Waldo Emerson; the other was the Oxbridge aesthete whose visit to Harvard in 1882 became part of the university's legend and lore, and whose eventual martyrdom was a cautionary tale. Shand-Tucci explores the dramatic and creative oppositions and tensions between the Whitmanic and the Wildean, the warrior poet and the salon dazzler, and demonstrates how they framed the gay experience at Harvard and in the country as a whole.The core of this book, however, is a portrait of a great university and its community struggling with the full implications of free inquiry. Harvard took very seriously its mission to shape the minds and bodies of its charges, who came from and were expected to perpetuate the nation's elite, yet struggled with the open expression of their sexual identities, which it alternately accepted and anathematized. Harvard believed it could live up to the Oxbridge model, offering a sanctuary worthy of the classical Greek ideals of male association, yet somehow remain true to its legacy of respectable austerity and Puritan self-denial. The Crimson Letter therefore tells stories of great unhappiness and manacled minds, as well as stories of triumphant activism and fulfilled promise. Shand-Tucci brilliantly exposes the secrecy and codes that attended the gay experience, showing how their effects could simultaneously thwart and spark creativity. He explores in particular the question of gay sensibility and its effect upon everything from symphonic music to football, set design to statecraft, poetic theory to skyscrapers. The Crimson Letter combines the learned and the lurid, tragedy and farce, scandal and vindication, and figures of world renown as well as those whose influence extended little farther than Harvard Square. Here is an engrossing account of a university transforming and transformed by those passing through its gates, and of their enduring impact upon American culture.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0312198965
• ISBN13: 9780312198961
• Release Date: May 2003
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press
• Length: 416 Pages
• Weight: 1.72 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.4" x 6.5" x 9.7"

Customer Reviews

Crimson letter

This really gives an insight into the gay community for those of us who have been related to someone who graduated from Harvard and was gay. It gave a small look into their movement, how it got started and how long it has been a part of the Harvard community. It was very insightful.

What cheek!

Shand-Tucci's previous book on Isabella Stewart Gardner was a rare treat and provided helpful hints to her psychology, appreciation of art, etc. The title "Art of Scandal" is precisely what this book puts into action. In the movie "Wilde" when Oscar is invaded at home by the bumptious Marquis of Queensbury, the latter acuses Wilde of being scandalous, to which he replies: "All the scandal is your own!" These Harvard boys were operating in that danger zone Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick so well defined in The Epistemology of the Closet: Silence! How many ways there are to read the silences! I especially appreciate Shand-Tucci for blowing the horn on that "sissy" Berenson. At long last someone is tracing the history of this overlooked subject. I don't think the UK(?) reviewer read the book. I would hardly think that Shand-Tucci is a misogynist, but he is certainly not writing a piece of gender criticism either. This is just fun and delightful reading. I always wanted to know what Auntie Mame was referring to when she tried to keep Patrick away from those snobbish girls on the Eastern seaboard. He ought to have been turning things upside down at Harvard!

A splendid concordance

Historian Shand-Tucci goes the distance with a deeply fascinating account of gay men studying and falling in love at Harvard University over the past 130 years. Page after page will surprise even those readers familiar with the men he's put under the microscope, and there are, as well, a number of character studies which show that Shand-Tucci has at least the gifts of a novelist. The torments of the closet make up the first half of the book, and the defiance of coming out gives piquancy and solidarity to the second half. Shand-Tucci seems to have thought hard about the cultural significance of many characters dismissed as minor elsewhere, and this is probably the first book to think of the achievements of Rene Ricard and Steve Jonas as being on a par with those of Philip Johnson and Lincokn Kirstein; but then again he's imaginative and in history, sometimes, that's a plus. I don't know he felt it necessary to add a dash of spite to his portrait of contemporary activist Charley Shively, this last touch kind of spoils the flavor of an otherwise terrific book for me.

Interesting Nuggets to be Found

Harvard, Homosexuality, and the Shaping of American Culture is, perhaps, an unfortunate sub-title for the otherwise interesting The Crimson Letter by Douglas Shand-Tucci as it does not quite live up to this rather grandiose idea of shaping american culture. The book, though, is still a fascinating stroll through the past hundred years of Harvard history. It starts a little slowly with the author setting up two archetypes but gathers steam as the twentienth century takes flight. The author does wander around the topic at times as the personality presented connections to Harvard are stretched or evidence of his homosexuality is tenuously produced but he keeps the narrative flowing in and among the varied characters populating this history. A rewarding read for the anyone who sticks with it.

Harvard History

A wonderful, readable history. Author Shand-Tucci combines scholarship with a breezy style, and an amusing array of anecdotes to highlight his thesis. Amidst better-known alums appear some fascinating figures, like Fred Loring ("Two College Friends") and Shirley Everton Johnson ("The Cult of the Purple Rose"), who show us that even if there weren't any gay alliances back in the school's busy 19th century, the Harvard boys found a way.